Jamie, have you ever read fan fiction?
by Duchesscupcake
Summary: Based on true events (okay, the only true event is I just discovered fan fiction and stayed up all night reading it). Please read and review, but, as our beloved Eddie says, "You're my first [Reagan], be gentle."


It was a beautiful day in September in New York City. The morning started cool, but now, by the afternoon, it was warm and sunny. Officers Reagan and Janko had just dropped a prisoner, Tommy "Tomato" Ciccone at the 2-9 precinct in Brooklyn, where he was connected to a string of grand theft auto charges. They were headed back to the City and thankful that their eventful tour was almost over.

In the passenger seat, Eddie let out a long yawn and pulled in her shoulders inward as she lengthened her arms forward in a stretch. She let out a small, self-satisfied moan, dropped her blond head against the head rest, and closed her eyes behind her aviator sunglasses. Her chin was slightly tipped up and she noticed how the sun on her arms was warm and comforting.

She'd been yawning all day and, while not unhappy, had seemed...distracted. Jamie cut his eyes at her and wondered, "Okay, Janko, you've yawned all day. Wha'd'ya, go out partying last night?"

Eddie cracked her eyes open to slits and looked over at Jamie. She was going to tell him. Of course, she was. They equally loved having fodder to banter against the other with. Their running inside jokes combined with that always-present sexual tension, had become their "thing", their little dance. Eddie loved sharing these quirks with him, but she often felt like she needed to arm herself for the ensuing banter before she began. She pondered what approach to take in explaining this to him. Jaime refused to submit to any social media trends and he was proudly old-fashioned in a lot of ways. This might require some explaining.

She looked at him over the top of her sunglasses and asked, "Jaime, have you ever heard of fan fiction?"

His eyebrows knitted together and before he could say it, she knew the answer. His chin had a way of lifting, almost like an uncertain facial shrug, that she noticed a nanosecond before he said, "No. What is it called again?"

"Fan. Fic. Tion," she enunciated each syllable while still watching him.

"No." This time it was more definitive.

"You know how you are watching a movie and you wonder what the characters are doing that you DON'T see in the movie?" she asked, almost excitedly.

"No."

 _Okay, Sport_ , Eddie thought. _Let me try a different approach._ "Like if you are watching a movie or a TV show, and days pass by, right, on the show or whatever? Then you start to wonder what other conversations or interactions did that person have to influence that next choice they made. Or from the climax of the movie, how did that character process that emotion to get to the end of the movie? Oh! Or there are these non-main characters. How did the big reveal in the movie impact them? You want to know more about what happened that you didn't see, you know?"

Jaime, while navigating, would glance at his partner from time to time while she was talking. In the middle of her explanation she had perched her sunglasses on top of her head and her hands were waving while she talked. When Eddie got like this, Jamie usually let her go because it was so damn cute to see how excited she got about things that were essentially trivial. He knew she was really invested in this topic as her shoulders started to roll and shrug with each phrase and her gaze lingered out of the windows, not looking at anything in particular. He also knew that she would be ready for him to respond once she eventually fixed her blue eyes on him, which she was now doing.

After a brief pause, and in a tone that had a touch of faux condescension, he said, "Eddie, you know they're not real people, right?"

She glared at the small smirk on his face and said, "Yes, Reagan, I know they aren't real people." After a moment she said "Oh!" in a way that no longer fazed him. He no longer thought that it meant a wayward pedestrian was jumping in front of the car or that a speeding Mac truck was trying to run them off the road. No, he had learned in these years in the cruiser with Janko that she had a revelation when he heard that particular phrase burst out of her mouth. It indicated that she just recalled some house gossip she picked up at the precinct or she wanted to tell him where they were going for lunch because she just recalled how amazing a particular steak sandwich was that she had some place. So he was not surprised when this single exclamation was followed by, "Remember when we had those two days off and we decided to binge watch "Prison Break" and we ordered from that terrible Chinese place?"

"Worst Chinese in Queens."

"I know, right?" Eddie was really on a roll. She knew she had the example that Jamie would understand. "Okay, so when we watched the show, remember we kept saying, 'Did Lincoln do it?' 'What would have happened to Scofield if he DIDN'T get put in Fox River?' 'What would Scofield have done if Burrows was executed?' And then there was the whole Tancredi situation…Is he using her? Does she go home and think about actually banging an inmate? Will they or won't they? And he leaves her the swans…."

Dear Reader, if you and I were sitting in the back of that RMP on this lovely afternoon, we would have thought nothing of the long pause that hung in air. We would have thought that Officer Reagan had been ignoring Officer Janko's rambling about a TV show of ill-fated lovers and he was now caught unaware that she was waiting for a response. Or, we might have thought that Officer Reagan was considering what he wanted to say to Officer Janko.

We would never have known that Jamie couldn't respond because of the lead that stuck in the bottom of his throat. We would never have known that he was thankful he had driven the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan hundreds of times so that his body could operate the cruiser on autopilot, while his mind willed his escaping thoughts about clandestine love back into the recesses of his mind.

We would have never known that Eddie was no longer speaking because her breath was caught in her chest as it did when she "fell down Alice's rabbit hole," as she called it. We would never know that she sat in the front seat, looking at but not seeing the skyline while she blinked rapidly. The hard flurry of her eyelids helped her compartmentalize, an area where she was not as skilled as Jamie and still had to physically will herself to do when she forgot.

We would have thought that the big breath Eddie was taking was just that, a breath before speaking again. We wouldn't have known that it was a stabilizer; something to ground her back to the present, to cruiser, to her partner, Officer Reagan.

"So, anyway," she continued, "fan fiction is something people write about all the feels they get from these TV shows and what have happened if the characters go the way they, the audience, want them to."

 _Thank you for the save, Janko_ , Jamie thought, glancing at her, and getting his thoughts back in order.

"So how did you find out about this?"

Eddie said, "Well, I was googling for spoilers about-"

"Spoilers?"

"Jamie, how old are you?" Eddie looked at him incredulously. In response to the slight smirk on his lips she said, "You know what a spoiler is, dumbass. So anyway, I was googling spoilers about what happens with Hook and Swan-"

"Oh, from that show you like?" Jamie interrupted again.

With an unamused expression, Eddie gazed at him, lazily tilting her face towards him. _You want to do this dance, Reagan? Okay_ , Eddie thought and then replied, "Um, no, the show we watch together."

"You make me record it on my DVR so that-"

Her turn to interrupt, "We end up watching it together. Don't deny your love for it." She plowed through his mumbled comment about her 'thing with pirates lately' and said, "So I wanted to see what is going to happen with their relationship this season and when I typed in Hook and Swan the words "fan fiction" autopopulated."

"And?"

"And, I stayed up all night reading stories people wrote about what would become of their favorite TV couple. And some of it was quite...intense." Eddie gave a small, single-sided shrug, pulled her glasses from atop her head back down onto her face and leaned her head against the headrest. She allowed her eyes to close, even though they were only a few blocks from the 12th precinct.

Jamie gestured to her phone with his chin and said, "If it's so great read me some" as he parked the car in front of the precinct.

"Don't be a pervert, Reagan!" Eddie retorted as they climbed out of the patrol car.

"Oh, wait, it's like, sex stuff!"

Eddie looked at Jamie over the roof of the cruiser and realized to her great satisfaction that Jamie was just now processing that she was up all night reading smut. "Oh my God, Reagan. You are really such a Boy Scout sometimes. I'll see you inside." She smiled to herself as she knew he was watching her walk in to the building.

XX

Eddie came out of the women's locker room in her jeans, boots, T-shirt, and a comfortable jacket. She had her bag slung over her shoulder and was heading out on a mission.

"Hey, drinks at McMahon's?" Jamie asked as they kept stride together walking out of the building.

She scrunched her nose in that way that said, 'I'm embarrassed, but fuck it, this is me' and said, "Not tonight. I have some reading to catch up on." She gave him a wink, tossed her hair, and practically ran to her Porsche to head home.


End file.
